PrimeJunta

Actually, stats are a relatively minor component of supporting 'multiclass' type builds in P:E. The real meat is in the talents (and, for casters, spells). Add a nice medium-duration accuracy buff to the wizard's spell selection, and boom! you can gish. No need to tweak the attributes for that.

I played BG2 the first couple of times the 'normal' way. Then I played a couple times with hand-crafted gimmick parties. Try it with a full party of kensai/mages. You'll roflstomp over everything. It's fun because ridiculous. Also the story and companions in it isn't really all that great; it's OK by porn standards I suppose but not so good I'd want to play it a second time for the story. The variety in combat encounters, tactics, and party composition OTOH does make for massive replayability. I.e. on subsequent playthroughs I did pretty much click through the story to get to the fighting. In any case Obsidian's trademark is their writing, which you can already see in the BB -- I swear there was more interesting writing there than in all of BW's games since BG2 put together. @Monte Carlo IMO it's too early to tell if the combat is too fast; the main problem is the lack of feedback and critical bugs that turn it into soup. If it is fast I think the main problem is with movement speed, not with attack or casting speed. I'd rather have them clean up the pathfinding, AI, and character freeze bugs first and, if possible, add some better feedback, then see if it still feels too fast.

Life, death, and aerobics. Works for me.

You know what, Indira? I'm getting bored of this wrangling over attributes. It's really not a particularly significant feature of the mechanics anyway. I'd much rather talk about, say, what kinds of talents or spells to add to make, say, ranged fighters or gish wizards workable. (But... I still wouldn't want to see the attribute system complicated more, e.g. by moving different damage type bonuses to different attributes. This is fine; it's no less 'intuitive' than STR affecting accuracy, armor making arcane spells go 'poof,' or deciding to change professions making you forget everything about your previous one until you suddenly remembered it all one tedious slog later. Or, for that matter, a rhinoceros surviving a 30-foot drop instead of going 'splash' because it has enough hit points.)

Bigger powder charges make the guns kick harder, and you need to be stronger to manage them, and since durability was removed by popular demand, the damn things won't ever blow up however much you overload them. There, done, moving on.

Here's an idea: how about offering some concrete, specific ideas on how to expand choice within classes, while staying within the bounds of the system and its publicly declared design goals? Whining about what a travesty the current system is and how it betrays the legacy of the IE games and how Josh is a poopy-head is unlikely to make much of a difference IMO. I've made a few--about tweaking fighters to allow ranged builds (currently not covered by any class, not counting ranger whose gameplay is so focused around Mr. Bear) and wizards with gish tactics (currently covered by ciphers, which have otherwise different gameplay).

Ranged ciphers are a bit of a deathlord at the moment actually. Low-risk, very high-reward. Ranged rogues are poorly supported as--AFAICT--all of their specials are melee only.

IMO the base AoE is too big for almost all AoE spells. I can fit most enemies within the base radius fireball already, for example, and the priest AoE buffs/debuffs are ridiculously large. I say shrink 'em and make the INT bonus bigger.

I'd rather add more abilities with durations and AoE. Barbs for example rely a lot on Frenzy and Defiant Resolve. Those are powerful and duration-limited, and INT already makes a tangible difference. Plus Carnage of course. Knockdown duration is a big deal for fighter effectiveness, and hobble duration makes a lot of difference for rogues as well. I say keep the effects as is and add more of those. I'm also not super-thrilled with the idea of making more than one attribute affect the same combat stat. It makes the system more confusing and blurs the differences between abilities.

IMO making the AoE effect of INT more pronounced and combining it with making the area controllable from base radius to radius with INT bonus would sort this out nicely. High-INT wizards would get significantly more control over their spells, low-INT ones would be restricted to base radius. It's a tangible benefit but not so much it would make INT a must-have stat for AoE spellcasters.

I for one am delighted that there are enemies that will kill you dead right quick if you don't take the right precautions, hard counters or no.

@tirnanogh AFAIK it's currently not (quite) playable on Wine, so I would hold off in any case.

The problem with that line of thinking is that it damns the majority of the game as unnecessary. Only if the majority of the fights are unnecessary.

Nope, makes INT too valuable. Also random failures are not fun. How many of you tried playing an armored arcane caster in the NWN's, with a non-zero chance for spell fizzle? I did. Took off the armor and went cheerfully to the back row again.

No, ranged fighters aren't currently supported. You'd be gimping yourself. A ranged cipher who refuses to use cipher abilities would actually work out better. This would be easy to remedy, and I hope they will.

You can create a full party in BG2. Just start in multiplayer mode.

Think of it this way: getting into an unnecessary fight is a strategic mistake. Such things should come with a price tag.

But the Petrify mechanic isn't. If you're already poisoned and losing, say, 4 Stamina / 1 Health per second, it'll convert it to 4 Health / second. That's the functional equivalent of 16 Stamina / second. That's scary.

...I present, spiders. There's a special kind of spider that inflicts the Petrify status effect. Petrified characters take damage directly from Health, rather than Stamina. If it so happened that he was just bit by another spider which Poisoned him... wowza. Terrifying. There are spell counters to defend against this, as well as tactics of course. I thought this was bugged but it's actually intentional. The problem in the beta right now is the usual, lack of feedback -- the only way to tell your character's been Petrified is if you see it zip by in the combat log. This is IMO the functional equivalent of 'zap you're dead' with the tiiiiny concession that if you catch it just in time and hit pause, there might be something you can do. There is a spell there somewhere that's kind of a Sanctuary equivalent, and others which temporarily suppress negative status effects. But it's still terrifying. I don't think y'all will miss death effects and hard counters when this shapes up.

IMO it's good that there are genuinely low-maintenance classes in the game. More potential variety. It would be quite different to play a party with, say, three fighters and three wizards or priests. It becomes more a game of positioning -- place the fighters to control the battlefield and leave them there, then use your casters to destroy the enemy (and keep the fighters standing). The fighters themselves might be boring, but having them could lead to interesting tactical twists.

I think I've been to that wedding. Never played Skyrim though.

Yep, heavy ranged weapons are currently OP relative to anything else (other than magic). I don't care for the OP's proposed solution though; adding more mechanics or applying different adjustment rates to different attacks would only complicate things further, whereas this is IMO relatively easily addressed by simple tuning of base damage, accuracy, and recovery time values plus tweaks to enemy AI so it targets squishies more aggressively. A morale system would be nice, even a rudimentary one, but it should manifest as morale breaking and enemies running away rather than bonuses/penalties to combat stats. (It worked well in many of the IE games.) The trouble with those kinds of adjustments is that they're hard to make properly transparent; you'll just see your character continuously missing without a clear indication why. As it is it's difficult enough to tell what's going on and why your character isn't doing any damage.

@Hamenaglar and others -- gave one a very brief spin today. It did not work very well. Perhaps I'm missing something though. Trouble is that the first-level accuracy buff is a rehash of that one DnD spell that gives you +20 to hit for your next attack. I.e. it's ridiculously short-duration. To make gish tactics viable I'd need a longer-duration, possibly less dramatic accuracy self-buff to make up for the abysmal base accuracy wizards have. Now everything else works as adverised except that instead of the expected burst of magically-enhanced sword-slinging it's whack whack (accuracy buff runs out) whiff whiff whiff whiff whiff whiff whiff (arcane veil runs out). I added a post to the General Builds Thread that a gishy accuracy self-buff would be nice. Hope some of the devs read it.

Just FYI, sex is central to the biggest questline in the Backer Beta.

Talking about combat XP? I'm fairly certain he and others have flatly stated that it's ruled out. Unless that changes, I can see why he wouldn't feel like stating it again (i.e., because it would immediately dump a truckload of distilled Internet hate on him). Bit of "Generalissimo Franco is still dead" IMO. "Combat XP still not on the table." (Yeah, there was that one video where it looked like he was leaving the door open, true, but I think you guys are grasping at straws here. Invite Ziets and have a good Irish wake, then move on. It wouldn't be an IE successor if there wasn't something about it that drove you up the wall, no?)